RELATED LINKS

SAN
ANTONIO--Tonight around 9 p.m. Eastern time, Marcus Paige is likely to find
himself in a position that will be entirely new to him: he will be
better-rested than the opposing point guard.

At 35.6
minutes per game, Paige is on pace to easily play the most minutes of any
player in the Roy Williams era. But that probably sounds downright leisurely to
Providence's Bryce Cotton, who averages 39.9 minutes per game and has played an
incredible 96.3 percent of his team's minutes--the highest such ratio in
America. That includes six games in which Cotton has played more than 40
minutes in a single game.

"That seems
to be the theme," Friars coach Ed Cooley said Thursday in San Antonio. "Even
during the season, everyone talks about our ironman. First and foremost, I
still think he's the most undervalued kid in all of American college
basketball. I think he's an elite-level guard. He's been playing 35 to 39
minutes a game since we've coached him. So I don't look at this as any
different. He's a mentally tough young man. He knows how to pace himself to
play a full game. We never think of taking him out of the basketball game,
ever."

Cooley
isn't exaggerating. In last weekend's run to the Big East tournament
championship, Cotton played 114 of a possible 120 minutes, sitting out only to
avoid some foul trouble in the quarterfinal game against St. John's. That's one
of just two games in Providence's past eight when Cotton has sat out at all.

"I thought
I played a lot of minutes until I started looking at his stats and seeing how
many minutes he played this season," Paige said. "And he's still able to be
effective the entire game despite playing that many minutes."

Despite the
workload, don't expect either player to look winded.
In NCAA tournament play, timeouts that normally last two minutes and 15 seconds
during the regular season stretch to two minutes and 30 seconds. There are no
more 30-second timeouts; the shorter timeouts in each half are 60 seconds
instead of 30. And the first called timeout of each half--instead of just the
second half--stretches to a full timeout. So each NCAA tournament game has 10
full timeouts instead of the standard nine, and each of the shorter timeouts
(normally 30 seconds) is twice as long.

That means
that barring foul trouble for either player, fans will be treated to almost a
full 40 minutes of what could be one of the best one-on-one showdowns of the
first round (sorry, NCAA, no matter what you want it to be called, it's still
the first round).

Cotton is a first-team All-Big East
pick and was the Most Outstanding Player at the Big East tournament. According to Ken Pomeroy's stats, Cotton uses 27.8 percent of Providence's possessions when he is on the court, meaning over a quarter of the times the Friars have the ball, it ends with Cotton making or missing a shot or committing a turnover.

Paige, of
course, is a first-team All-ACC selection and one of six finalists for the
Cousy Award. He's not as assertive as Cotton (according to those same stats, Paige uses 22 percent of UNC's possessions, which is only the fourth-highest ratio on his own team, behind James Michael McAdoo, Brice Johnson and Kennedy Meeks).

Still, his offensive is indispensable, and at 17.4 points
per game, he's on pace to be the shortest leading scorer for Carolina since
Larry Brown, among other achievements. He'll have to score for the Tar Heels to have a chance to
advance. But Friday night will also bring him a big defensive challenge.

"(Cotton) is a great player on
offense," Paige said. "He has a great pull-up jumpshot. He's really quick with
the ball, and we're going to have to do a great job containing him on the ball
screen."

Defending that ball screen has
alternately been solid and troublesome this year, so the communication between
Paige and the Carolina big men will be important. When it comes to the
one-on-one matchup, however, Roy Williams believes the Iowa native is prepared.

"People don't give Marcus credit
defensively," the head coach said. "He is really good. I would not be surprised
if Marcus has not won our defensive player of the game award more than any
point guard I've ever had (Paige has won it a team-high 10 times this year).

"He does have a load offensively.
He does have a load handling the basketball. He does have a load with leadership.
But he's really, really good defensively."